iPhone 2.0

Fanboy picked up his iPhone on Friday and there was much rejoicing! It's a pretty slick device, I have to admit, a dramatic improvement over my old cell phone, which basically was just a cell phone. The iPhone is my introduction to smartphones. I waited about a year before getting in on this, skipping iPhone's version 1.0 to be rewarded by its 3G and GPS additions in version 2.0. The GPS chip and Google maps is a brilliant combination: it pretty much showed my location on the deck. Well, not quite at that resolution, but you can make out the house and driveway on the display. This ought to work really well in a big city. Surprisingly enough, Clemson (the city and campus) has 3G service already. I wasn't expecting that. However, at home and on campus I use the wifi connection and for data I think that'll be the way to go at airports as well. Of course, at the house, no actual phone service, d'oh! We're in some kind of AT&T dead zone. I get maybe a single bar's worth of signal strength at the top of the driveway but that's about it.

The phone came in this brick-like box, along with a power adapter, USB cable, and the white headphones, of course. One of the cooler features of the phone is the SDK and the apps that are now available for it. Reminded me of the large number of apps for the Palm pilot (anyone still using these?). I downloaded a few of the free ones; some seem to just be conduits to web pages, making them somewhat redundant. What's interesting is that most rely on connection to the network and a few make use of the GPS location. This is quite different from the old Palm pilot apps which could only rely on the host computer's web connection and occasional sync'ing with the handheld device. I'll probably post more about the iPhone as I discover its features and annoyances. Of the latter, some netizens have complained about the 2 megapixel camera, considering it too wimpy. I dunno, it seems much better than my old Razr's camera. I took the box picture above with the phone. It's a little grainy I suppose, but not too bad I think.